I'm looking into "Comet", "Ajax Push" or "Reverse Ajax" and have found APE: http://www.ape-project.org. It seems very promising. Any one with experience with this? Any pros and cons I should know about?
Also, are there any other engines I should be considering?
Sounds like you want to be using WebSockets or Comet.
If you want to self-host there are the following options:
If you don't want to host the real-time infrastructure then you could use a hosted service such as Pusher who I work for.